Anyone who grew up in Brave or lived there any time before the trains stopped running, remembers coming up the road from Blacksville and getting stopped by the train at Cliff Bridge just off Route 7, and again just a little bit further up the road by The Gun Club at Morris Run Road. If you lived in Brave behind the Brass Plant, you’d get stopped by the train a third time on Chestnut Street right at the Brass Plant.
The trains were a part of daily life to the folks in Brave for many years. Usually you didn’t even notice, and it sure could be a pain when you got stuck waiting for the train to clear the road. But it was a huge part of the local economy, transporting coal from the mines in the area and providing people with good paying jobs. It’s a safe bet to say that everyone had adapted to the sound of the whistles as the trains went through Brave, going largely unnoticed unless you were in the company of someone who didn’t live there. They would invariably ask, “How do you deal with that?” The reply often was, “Oh, the train. You get used to it and don’t even notice.” Most people could sleep right through it.
Like everything, the railroad tracks from Blacksville to Brave have a story, and a large part of that story begins with the Brass Plant, or the company that initially inhabited that building in 1906, Peoples Natural Gas. Peoples Natural Gas built the Brave Pumping Station, the largest pumping station of its kind in the world in 1905 and 1906, and it turned a small community of farms into the booming town of Brave. Brave was quite the place in the days of Peoples Natural Gas; it boasted a school, gas stations, streetlights, several stores, and even a hotel. The gas company was even responsible for bringing the Railroad through Brave.
Railroad tracks first forged their way from Blacksville to Brave in 1918, when the Morgantown and Wheeling Railway Company finished laying the tracks in Brave in August 1918 as World War I was raging on in Europe. The Morgantown and Wheeling would bring coal to the gas company in Brave and take many cars of Casing Head Gasoline back down the valley towards Morgantown. Casing Head Gas is gas taken unprocessed from an oil well. The Morgantown and Wheeling Railway hit hard times throughout the winter of 1919-1920. Cars and tracks were wearing out and the line was plagued by derailments as a result. In the winter of 1921-1922, the railroad would shut down completely, and its assets would eventually be taken up by the Scotts Run Railway.
The Scotts Run Railway was a product of the Osage and Morgantown Coal companies. They wished to further expand their rail traffic towards Peoples Natural Gas in Brave, and the purchase of the assets of the Morgantown and Wheeling Railway made this a possibility. The Scotts Run Railway would not only haul coal to Peoples Natural Gas, but they would also offer passenger service into Brave. Scotts Run Railway was formed in the interest of the Monongahela Railway, and, in 1933, the Monongahela would take complete ownership of Scotts Run.
The Monongahela Railway was a larger company headquartered in Brownsville, and a coal hauling short line railroad jointly controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Under control of the Monongahela, passenger traffic through Blacksville into Brave would cease, though coal shipments coming to Peoples Natural Gas would remain consistent. By 1959 Peoples had closed and the building would soon be taken over by Bell’s Wholesale Grocery. For several years the only traffic on the line to Brave was cargo shipments of canned and paper goods going to Bells a few times each month. Movements of the line were controlled by the yardmaster at the Maidsville Yard, in Maidsville West Virginia.
On February 12, 1967, the last train would run to Brave, all while coal fields around Brave and Blacksville were being developed. The Waynesburg Southern Railway would be tapped to take over transport of the coal coming from the new Blacksville No. 1 Mine and Federal No. 2 Mine. New tracks were laid around this time, on different rights of way, requiring a cut to be made through a large hill just beyond the old Peoples Natural Gas building. During construction of this cut and track, a Monongahela Culture Native American settlement was discovered and excavated.
Waynesburg Southern would control the rails through Brave and Blacksville until they merged with Consolidated Coal in 1993, and eventually the line would be bought by Norfolk Southern; trains ceased just a few years ago.
Now the tracks between Brave and Blacksville remain largely abandoned. Occasionally maintenance vehicles will travel them to keep a check on track conditions but otherwise the most traffic they see are folks walking to spots along Dunkard Creek to go fishing or when riding their ATVs. But, they have their story, and what an interesting story it is, taking us back to a time when big business was in the area, and coal was king.